When Over 100,000 Watched Soccer at the Rose Bowl in 1984

I’ll let George Vecsey of the New York Times imagine the scene in Pasadena, a town at the foot of the San Gabriel mountains north of Los Angeles. The dateline to his report reads August 13th, 1984.

Just before dusk on Saturday night, the Firestone blimp lumbered into the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains investigating a report of a football game in the Rose Bowl. As the balloon dipped low, the cameraman in the belly might have reported back to his network.

“Uhhh, there must be a mistake, boss,” he could have said. “There’s a huge crowd in the Rose Bowl, and they’re screaming and doing the wave and eating hot dogs, but there’s something wrong. These players are normal-shaped and they aren’t wearing helmets. And they’re kicking a round ball!”

“Thanks for warning us,” the man at network command probably said. “Just a bunch of ethnics watching a soccer game. We’ll go with the synchronized swimming re-runs. It’s a good tie-in with our fall programming.”

In his imagined scenario of the blimp flying by, Vecsey encapsulated the hope and frustration for soccer fans that remarkable night in Pasadena created. For France were playing Brazil, and it was the final of the Olympic Games soccer tournament. The crowd of 101,799 was the largest ever to assemble in the United States to watch a soccer game; and it brought the total attendance for the entire tournament to over 1,421,627 million for the 32 games at an average of 44,500.

At the same time, nobody was watching it on television: ABC’s Firestone blimp did indeed pay it scant attention. The tournament came in the dog days of the NASL, the glory days of Pele past and professional outdoor soccer seemingly dying an unlamented death in the United States.

The success of the Olympic tournament could not have come at a more crucial moment, then, for it set the U.S. on the track to host the World Cup and launch a new professional league that we now know as MLS.
The football was by all reports good, if not spectacular. Olympic rules meant players with World Cup experience weren’t eligible to play, but future World Cup captains such as Italy’s Franco Baresi and Brazil’s Dunga were amongst the rising talent who took the field.

And the fans had shown up from the start. 78,265 attended the opening the game of the tournament, as the U.S. took on Costa Rica at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto, California. The U.S. won 3-0, but they would lose the next game to Italy 1-0 in front of 63,000 at the Rose Bowl, and were eliminated when they could only tie with Egypt in the final group game.

Despite that disappointment, Americans kept coming to watch soccer in droves, fuelled by curiosity and cheap tickets. The attendance at the final was no aberration: in the semis, Brazil beat Italy 2-1 before 83,642 at Palo Alto and France defeated Yugoslavia at the Rose Bowl, with 97,451 in attendence. Even the bronze medal match, also at the Rose Bowl, attracted 101,799.

Egypt vs. France, Quarter Final, Rose Bowl

However, Vecsey’s imagination of the Firestone blimp veering away from the Rose Bowl speaks to the one great frustration of the tournament for soccer’s evangelists in the 1980s: American television ignored the competition. ABC only squeezed in about five minutes of coverage of the final game, despite its obvious appeal to the public.

That problem of declining television interest reflected the similar issue facing the NASL as it entered its final days. But crucially, the tournament proved to FIFA that the United States would be able to host and attract spectators to a World Cup. Alan Rothenberg, who organised the Olympic tournament, had made his name and his point to the FIFA executives who had treated the American bid for the 1986 World Cup with something verging on disdain.

And by 1994, the Rose Bowl would host the final of the World Cup in front of 94,194 people. A professional league would be launched soon after, with the winner of the MLS Cup taking home the Alan I. Rothenberg Trophy.

Let’s allow George Vecsey to close the scene on the night when 101,799 watched soccer at the Rose Bowl, France having beaten Brazil 2-0 and the beautiful game facing an uncertain future in the States.

After the awards ceremony, a touching moment took place. Even though the United States had been eliminated in the first round, the largely American audience began chanting “U-S-A!” — unwilling to go home just yet, celebrating France and Brazil and the summer games and the full moon and the fireworks, but also celebrating the universal sport that goes on and on, even when the Olympic torch is extinguished.

8 Responses to "When Over 100,000 Watched Soccer at the Rose Bowl in 1984"

Anyway, this is an incredible find, Tom. It would be supremely interesting to track down someone who was actually there at the game that day and ask him/her what the atmosphere was like, both inside the stadium and surrounding the event.

That image of Baggio pretty much represents my earliest memory of watching football. My dad made me watch the 1994 WC final with him, and although the game itself turned out to be boring, Baggio’s misery after missing his PK was seared forevermore onto my brain. I’ve never forgotten it — down to the exact slump of his shoulders — not Italy’s sadness, but one man’s failure to live up to expectations. (Whose expectations, his or his country’s? Both, I guess, but at that moment his grief was the only thing I could focus on.) Wow, that was a hell of a long time ago ..

Em, there’s so much of American soccer history barely commented on nowadays. It’s almost as if there’s a blank slate until the 1994 World Cup.

One of the books that briefly discusses the Olympics, David Wangerin’s Soccer in a Football World, does explore this history in depth and for anyone interested I highly recommend it.

But it can be a touch dry in that it doesn’t get at the atmosphere at games like this one: as you suggest, a first hand account would be fascinating. I’ll send a note to the Flickr user responsible for the photo I used of the Egypt quarter-final, as they may well also have been at the final too.

As for the 1994 final, what a shame it was the worst game of what was otherwise perhaps the best World Cup I can remember properly. I wonder if that hurt soccer here amongst the general public or if the quality of the play didn’t really matter?

I think the fact that the final was a 0-0 draw decided on penalties did hurt the game in terms of its potential to the casual American sports fan. With the possible exception of the US matches earlier on (none of which were classics) it was the only match of the tournament that many of them would have been aware of, and even if they didn’t watch, the score and post-match commentary simply confirmed what many of them had been brought up to believe since the early days of the NASL (and before).

I was in Europe for the ’84 Olympics, but my recollection of the contemporary accounts was that the crowd in Pasadena that day wasn’t primarily a soccer crowd, but rather full of people who wanted to take part in the Olympic hype that had taken over Southern California. The soccer tickets were the most reasonably priced and most widely available for any team sport (other than team handball, which hardly anyone in the US even knows exists, let alone understands and appreciates).

I highly recommend Wangerin’s book. The beginning is quite dry because it discusses very early American soccer history. At times the book reads like a term paper. Once he gets into the modern history of American soccer it’s a facinating read. To read it I had to order it directly from David at http://www.davidwangerin.net/.

I’m not sure if soccer will really ever catch on in America. That was the goal will all the millions paid to Beckham, but that hasn’t really produced. Americans just need more points, more tackling, less 0-0 games. We have no attention span.